Formatting Your eBook: Uploading Your Book for Sale (Step 4)

So you have your book! Yay! The first thing to do is just rejoice. Writers can be technical, right? Haha!

Okay, champagne and strawberries aside, you still have to make your book for sale. To do that, you want to pick which websites to upload to:

Amazon: the beast. Pretty much all indie books are also published on Amazon.
Barnes & Noble: good place to be, though they don’t offer a lot of help with marketing or rankings. In terms of sales, many people look here.
Apple eBooks: Need I say more?
Smashwords: popular because of its willingness to list books free. You can also create discount coupons or award prizes by giving people codes for a free book. Tracks rankings by genre and has good notification options.
Monkeybars.net: Up-and-coming distribution site with a really cool strategy. Instead of paying a distribution fee like with the first 3 sites, you pick how much you want to award people who recommend your book and make sales for you. So instead of paying 30% to Monkeybars, you can pay 30% to the person who refers your book. It’s free to list on Monkeybars. Cool idea. You can read my review of them by clicking here.

Each site requires different formatting. Here’s the run down:

Amazon: Word DOC file or HTML File (HTML file enables linked TOC and other links throughout the book for touch screen Kindles).
Barnes & Noble: ePub or HTML. In my experience, the HTML is converted oddly. Just upload the ePub.
Apple: ePub.
Smashwords: Word DOC file. It’s not possible to preserve HTML formatting, and thus, I’m not a huge fan of Smashwords’ “meat grinder” formatter. They also have incredibly strict requirements for their expanded distribution network
Monkeybars: PDF, ePub, and MOBI file (for kindle). You can upload all three, and it all depends on what you want for sale. I recommend uploading all of them, since you have them all anyway.

 

Uploading to Amazon

To start, go to Amazon KDP and create an account (or sign in if you already have one. This can be the same login info for your normal Amazon account).

Logging in takes you to the dashboard, which looks like this:

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Go to the “Add new title” button at the top of the books grid (blue headers at the bottom of that image). The wizard will walk you through all the steps you need, and you’ll be published! Once you hit “agree and publish,” you’ll have to wait anywhere from 12 hours to 2 days, but then it’ll be up. It all depends on Amazon’s traffic at the time.

 

Uploading to B&N

Head to Barnes & Noble’s Pubit  feature for indies. Create an account or use your bn.com account to login. Here’s what the Pubit dashboard looks like:

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You can see the “Add new title” pretty easily here. It’s just as straightforward as Amazon, though the fields are in a different order than Amazon’s. You’ll breeze through it.

 

Uploading to Apple

I frankly haven’t messed with this. From what I can tell, you have two choices: use a paid seller account to list your books for sale, or offer your book for free via the free seller. You can read more about it in the Apple FAQ . I might deal with this later, I might not. If you want to throw in your two cents in the comments, feel free. I’ll update this section as the comments come in.

 

Uploading to Smashwords

Head to Smashwords, create an account, and go to “publish” in the menu. Smashwords is different in that you don’t actually upload your book in the same place that you would track sales later, as is true of Amazon and B&N. Here’s what the site looks like:

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It’s pretty straightforward. When the book finishes going through their “meat grinder,” which churns out pretty much every possible format for an eBook (you can pick which ones you want if you don’t want it to churn out all of them).

They’ll send you an email after your book finishes the eBook formatting, and this email will list concerns that their manual reviewers might have with the format for the extended distribution network. If you’re clear of issues, you can submit the book for review via the dashboard. Then, Smashwords will look at your book and accept or reject it for those networks. Many of these networks, particularly Sony, prefers you go through Smashwords’s network instead of through them.

Smashwords, as I said before, has some specific formatting requirements. So specific, in fact, that they wrote a book about it. They recommend you read it before uploading. I recently unpublished from Smashwords to experiment with Amazon’s KDP Prime program, and I’m not really sure I’ll go back to Smashwords. It was always a headache to deal with their formatting requriements, and I rarely sold there. That’s me, though. You should still try it for yourself.

 

Uploading to Monkeybars

I like Monkeybars a lot, primarily because you get to upload whatever files you want to sell. Complete freedom with both your format type and your selling structure.

Go to Monkeybars  and create an account if you don’t have one. Don’t forget to add me as a friend! I love connecting on that site.

So after you’re set up and you add me, head over to “Upload to sell.” This will walk you through the uploading process and publish you instantly. Here’s a screenshot of the market site:

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Congratulations, you’ve graduated formatting boot camp!

Well gang, that’s it! Of course, you can get into the friskier HTML editing and add images to your books, but that’s more advanced than what most writers need for their novels. Happy formatting, and as always, let me know if you have questions.

 
The Full Formatting Bootcamp Syllabus:

Creating Your Source File
Customizing & Editing Your Book’s HTML
Finding a Conversion Software & Converting Your Book
Uploading Your Book for Sale